


walk in the valley of kings

by sunshine_states



Series: Triptych [3]
Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo, Winternight Series - Katherine Arden
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Russian Mythology, the disastrous family reunion fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23075257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_states/pseuds/sunshine_states
Summary: In which the Darkling goes on a power trip, Zoya Nazyalensky is exceedingly competent and increasingly furious, and Nina Zenik has a dead witch camping out in her head.
Relationships: Hanne Brum/Nina Zenik, Morozko/Vasilisa Petrovna, Nikolai Lantsov/Zoya Nazyalensky
Series: Triptych [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1400695
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14





	walk in the valley of kings

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm doing the thing. Title comes from "Glitter & Gold" by Barns Courtney, because I gotta keep up the song lyric theme. 
> 
> TW in this chapter for a brief description of dissociation and implied violence.
> 
> EDIT: I did what is probably a serious faux pas and combined the previous fic with the first chapter of this one, as having two separate prologues seemed kind of dumb.

The Darkling’s dreams are full of grim, green-eyed Grisha who tell him things he can never remember and grave young men who call him _Aleksander,_ and so the Darkling does not sleep. He stays awake instead, glaring at his jailers, mulling over what it was he did to save himself in the Fold.

That’s the trouble with _merzost_ ; like sticking your hand in an open flame, you can never quite recall the sensation afterward. The mind shies away from the experience. He only knows that the volcra tore into his face, and in his desperation he forgot that he could not command the darkness.

But how, he wonders, can one _remember_ to _forget_? The strange creature who visited him two nights ago might know. But she has not shown her face since she taunted him through the bars of his cell, and she did not seem especially inclined to be helpful, anyway. The Darkling, as ever, is on his own.

Once, when he was younger and more sentimental, he’d asked his mother about his grandfather’s parents.

“Why do you want to know?” she snapped. She was cleaning a rabbit; he’d chosen this time specifically to ask because it was more difficult for her to get up and leave. “They’re dead.”

He shrugged a shoulder, suddenly less certain of his course of action. “I was just–curious. Did you ever meet them?”

“No, I did not. Stop asking silly questions.”

“Were they,” he said, and swallowed. “Were they like us?”

“They were an Inferni and a Squaller,” she said curtly. “That’s all I know. Now hand me that scraper, boy. This hide won’t cure itself.”

Later, when he was sick and feverish, she told him about his namesake, Aleksander Lightbringer, hero of a battle he’d never heard of, and about the boisterous, golden-haired prince that he had served. Stroking his forehead, she told him about her grandmother the Inferni, who slew a lord called Deathless. Tipping broth into his mouth, dabbing at his sweaty cheeks with a cool cloth, she told him about her father’s uncle, the sorcerer known only as the Bear.

“He could bring the dead to life,” she said. “All he had to do was wish it so.”

At the time, the Darkling thought it was just a fanciful story for a sickly boy. Now he’s less certain. He shifts in place, wincing a little at his sore muscles. This much is inescapable: if he wants to survive, he must act quickly. He suspects that Zoya has been agitating for his immediate execution, and Nikolai Lantsov, for all he is a fop and a fool, might well listen to her in time.

He does not want to die. He has lived a half-life all these years in not wanting to die. He has orchestrated catastrophes and stolen bodies in not wanting to die. He will not end his life in this cell. He will not kneel for the executioner or any other man. He has had enough of kneeling.

Something in him shifts. A golden door swinging open. Fire kindled all at once. He struggles to his feet.

“Stay where you are,” one of the guards snaps. The Darkling ignores her.

He needs the lock on the cell door to unlatch itself, and so it does. He needs the torches posted along the walls to go out, and so they do, guttering as if pinched by invisible fingers. Sunlight shafts through the bars, but that is an inconvenience, too, and the skies over Os Alta go as dark as the depths of the Fold.

The guards are wide-eyed, startled by how quickly their fortunes have turned. He sees the shadow-woman standing behind them, her pale eyes gleaming and intent, but she makes no move to stop him.

_On my side, then,_ the Darkling thinks. _At least for now_.

He forgets that he was ever bound. The chains around his wrists groan and fall to the flagstones. One of the guards tries to stop his heart, but the Darkling forgets that he has that power and the pressure in his chest melts away. He strides forward, smiling, shadows spilling from his hands like smoke.

“What?” he asks them mockingly, as the Heartrenders reach for his vital organs and the Etherealki summon their elements. They are afraid. They are young. But they were taught according to the methods that _he_ developed over centuries, and even twelve against one will not be enough to even their odds. “You’ve seen me summon before.”

He slices through the first guards with a blade of shadow. He strangles the fifth and sixth with their own collars, and he bursts the hearts of guards seven through ten. The last two he robs of breath, and then he steps over their blue-lipped bodies and into the empty guardroom. The power in his blood _sings_. He smells green leaves, winter ice, lakewater. Anticipation is honey on his tongue.

_He could bring the dead to life,_ his mother says, blurred by time and anguish. _All he had to do was wish it so_.

There are six hundred and seventy-five bodies in the Os Alta cemetery. The Darkling’s fingers curl into a fist, and the first of them opens its eyes.

***

Zoya and Genya are in the market near the palace walls when the sun goes out. Darkness falls as abruptly as if a curtain were dropped, and the people in the square suck in their breath as one. Murmurs break out, growing louder and more panicked as storm clouds boil up in the starless sky and thunder rumbles overhead.

Zoya swings around to stare at Genya, and then they run.

The side streets are empty; everyone here goes to the market in the mornings. They sprint past a startled dog and a small girl who is gazing up at the dark clouds and sobbing.

“This isn’t good,” Genya wheezes as they round a corner. She’s very pale beneath her scars, but her jaw is set and her single eye is hard.

Zoya doesn’t answer. The crackly smell of the gathering storm is everywhere. Her world has narrowed to the palace gates and the single thought, as clear and sharp as a cut diamond, that she should have killed the Darkling when she had the chance.

She bulls her way through the gate with a shouted order to the guards, just in time for a bolt of lightning to scythe down and cleave the double-eagle fountain in two. A hard rain begins to fall and the wind rises, thick with the smell of rot. Then the screaming begins. Zoya pushes Genya out of the way as a horde of people flow past, wild-eyed, glancing over their shoulders, bowling over the guards and stumbling over each other, heedless, bleeding. She reaches out and snags a man by the elbow.

“Let me go!” he wails, thrashing in her grip, but Zoya holds on grimly.

“What is it?” she shouts over the clamor. The fetid wind rises to a shriek around them. “What’s going on?”

“The cemetery,” he babbles. “The cemetery, they’re all rising – oh, _Saints_ –”

Zoya lets him go and he stumbles before throwing himself back into the panicking crowd. The smell of rot is thick now, filling her nostrils. Now that the crowd has gone, she can just hear it over the wind and the rain. The uneven shuffle of feet that lack the skin and sinew to work properly. The loud, labored breath of something that should not be.

It’s midnight in Os Alta, and the dead are coming.

***

When Nikolai was new to the ways of ruling, he once holed himself up in the royal library for one deliciously edifying afternoon. He devoured all the books he had been barred from, the secret histories, the heretical texts, the alleged grimoires, the unredacted folktales, and quite a few illustrated manuals on acts his tutors would have simply referred to as “flagrant indecency.” He emerged as the sun was setting to the sight of Ministers Ivanov and Belenko, both of them looking rather dour.

“Hello!” Nikolai said, cheerful and hoping to distract them. “You’re both from the border, as I recall.”

“Yes,” Minister Ivanov admitted. Perhaps a year ago he would have hedged around the subject, but Alina had made the southern hinterlands somewhat more respectable. “Your Majesty –“

“Do you know ‘The Chains of the Winter-King?’” Nikolai barreled on, heading down the corridor to his study and motioning for them to follow.

“Yes…” Minister Belenko sounded as though he were having teeth pulled. “But it’s not exactly a –“

“- decent song,” Minister Ivanov supplied. A sideways glance told Nikolai that the man had turned a rather interesting shade of red. “It’s quite – quite –“

“Sensual?” Nikolai said, when neither of them seemed ready to put a name to it. “My dear fellows, what version were _you_ listening to? The one in the book is quite chaste.”

Minister Ivanov sputtered.

"There are a number of versions,” Minister Belenko said, bravely. “Your Majesty, may I ask what brought this on?”

“Was he a Grisha?” Nikolai asked them. He breezed past the guards at the doorway and into his study, where he began to root around in a pile of papers for the latest reports from the northern outposts.

“I suppose he must have been,” said Minister Belenko. “A – a Squaller of immense power.”

“And the Shorn Maiden? You know, I never knew her story, but it’s _quite_ fascinating. An Inferni, one would think, except she seems to have some affinity for summoning darkness as well.”

“I would hardly call the Midnight road –“

“Close enough,” Nikolai said. He located the report and brushed off a few tea-cake crumbs before folding it and placing it in his pocket. “And the winter-king’s brother, the Bear. _He_ must have been some kind of Darkling, mustn’t he.”

“There _were_ Darklings before the current – before the traitor,” said Minister Ivanov. He and Belenko seemed increasingly puzzled by the conversation that Nikolai had summarily yanked them into. “I suppose he must have been – one of the others.”

_But there weren’t,_ Nikolai thought. _There were only the two._

“It’s just a song, _moi tsar,_ ” Belenko said, sounding as though he rather feared for his new monarch's sanity.

“Yes,” Nikolai said, smiling through his unease. “Just a song. Well! What did you want to see me about?”

The song comes back to him now, as Os Alta shudders and groans around him, as the guards are thrown back by a wave of darkness and _he_ arrives in its wake, gray eyes gleaming and intent.

_White as winter boughs and bone,_ Nikolai thinks, cold in the sudden midnight of the capital. _Only this time there’s no Shorn Maiden to stand between the king and the sacrifice. Which is which, I wonder?_

“Hello again,” he says, around the growing knowledge that he will die here. “How did you escape the dungeons?”

The Darkling only smiles and shakes his head. Fair enough.

“Where is Zoya?” he asks. _Tolya. Tamar. David. Genya._ Stop. If he focuses on what he might have lost, he’ll be no use to anyone, but the words come spilling out of his mouth regardless. “I don’t suppose you ran into her on your way up?”

"Zoya is dead,” the Darkling says. His teeth flash in the dim light of the torches, sharp and hungry.

It isn’t true. It isn’t _true_ , and no matter if it feels as though he is being turned into some nightmare-creature all over again. He won’t escape this encounter alive if it’s true, and so it isn’t.

“Ah, yes,” he says, with only the faintest waver in his voice, “because you’re known to be so reliable about these things. Where is your army, though? I haven’t seen any of those charming shadow beasts of yours, so –“

“I found – other reserves of strength,” the Darkling says. He glances at the torches and they flicker out as one, and then Nikolai really is in the dark.

Nikolai first impulse is to say something clever. He’s dizzy, and this – the distant rumble of carts, dying screams of his army, the roaring of the wind – all feels very distant, somehow. Unreal. He’s in the song but he’s just a bystander, one more face in the crowd watching the Shorn Maiden duel a demon-king.

A cold hand shocks him out of his stupor.

“With me, now,” someone hisses, and their voice is so absolutely full of authority that he obeys.

Nikolai will remember this day as one in which he was very, very stupid, repeatedly, in ways that by rights should have gotten him killed. These things happen on battlefields, when action is at its height and animal instincts take over. You make decisions that either save or condemn you, and one can look much like the other when your blood is up and death is smiling in your face.

His maybe-rescuer is fast, and their grip numbs the extremities of his hand. They’re wearing soft boots such as hunters wear in the woods, and he is painfully aware of the clatter of his own. _Tolya. Tamar._ They would have rushed to his side the moment the attack began, which means…stop. Think about that later. Survive.

They crash through a doorway and he has a split second to take in the sight of the twins, sooty and bruised but _alive_ ¸ before they are rushing past him to bar the door. A single lamp burns in the corner, and by the light of it he sees –

“Baghra?” he says, bewildered.

Same silver hair, same stubborn chin, same sense of something _sharp_ and _deadly_ under the deceptive mantle of her age. But it’s not her. This woman has laughter-lines about her eyes and a warmth to her, even in the midst of all this, that he never saw on the old Grisha’s face. He breathes out, smiles. 

“I beg your pardon,” he says, because superficial charm is better than hysteria. “I mistook you for someone else."

The woman who is not Baghra smiles back, exhaustion warring with grim amusement in the expression.

“Baghra was my cousin,” she says. “ _I_ am Marya Vladmirovna.”


End file.
